Book Marketing for Nonfiction Authors Blog

How a Homemade Cover Design Can Kill Your Self-Published Book

Years ago when I owned a bookstore, local authors constantly showed up peddling their books and 9 times out of 10, I could instantly tell when a book was self-published simply from the cover. Often times the covers simply featured text and lacked any depth or interest. I knew it would be hard to convince store visitors to buy those books. The unfortunate reality is that we do judge a book by its cover.

Cover design is one of the two most important elements when publishing a book (the other is professional editing). If your cover looks homemade, make no mistake about it, readers will notice.

I’m even willing to throw myself under the bus for this post! Years ago I published a series of workbooks and, ahem, designed the covers myself. What do you think of this workbook cover? When I look at it now I want to cringe!

Now here’s a book I recently published through my company, Authority Publishing. Our pro designer worked magic on the cover:

Can you see the difference?

If you’re publishing your book yourself, I urge you to hire a professional designer—one who has experience with book covers. That’s another big distinction. Not all graphic designers have cover design experience, and there really is an art to making a beautiful cover. Here are some others we’ve recently designed:

No related posts.

Free Book Launch Checklist

Our book launch checklist is an essential tool to help you prepare for your next launch (or catch up on some steps you missed last time!).Get yours here.